A post you keep improving

The stowing post has not changed since it shipped. You do the ritual, carry the heartwood home, build the post, and that is the end of it.

There are three pieces now that you build on the ground beside a post. They are not containers and you put nothing in them. Each one changes what the post does.

• Creel rail. The post holds 24 slots instead of 12, and its spirit carries 20 a trip instead of 10.
• Spirit perch. A second spirit lives in it, so two carry to your chests instead of one.
• Hod jib. Craft at a bench near the post and the recipe list counts what is in the chests around it, and spends out of them.

They stand next to the post because that is how the game already shows you what a station can do. A menu would have been less work for me, and then every post looks the same however much you have poured into it.

The rail and the perch

The rail took three goes to find a shape. Shelves and bins first, which is the obvious reading of "it holds more" and looked like furniture nobody would build. Then a barrow, a winch and a cellar hatch, which were better objects but belonged in a different game. Baskets on a rail was the third try.

Take the rail off again and the post shrinks back, but it will not put anything on the floor. If what is in there does not fit, it keeps the bigger grid until you have moved some out.

The perch is a second spirit rather than a faster one. Speed was already a number in the config file, so raising it never felt like an upgrade.

The jib

This is the one I put off building. Craft from container mods are everywhere and they are also the fastest way to flatten this game, so it only works for biomes whose boss you have killed. Meadows with Eikthyr, Black Forest with the Elder, swamp and ocean with Bonemass, up to the Ashlands with Fader.

I tried pricing it high instead of gating it and that does not work. A price only decides when you can build the thing, and after that it is open. Ask for black metal and you are paying that off the back of Moder with Yagluth still alive. My own price does some of it to me anyway: iron nails mean the Elder is dead before anyone owns a jib, so the first two rows of the table never refuse anybody anything.

It will not fetch for building, it will not feed a smelter or a kiln, and it cannot reach a chest you could not open yourself. The line is between carrying and deciding. Walking twenty iron from the same chest to the same forge is not a decision. Whether you can afford the armour is.

What they cost

They are meant to arrive at three different points instead of all at once: the post out of the Black Forest, the rail and the jib on the swamp, the perch on the mountain. The post moved too, its nails are bronze now instead of iron.

Three of the four want a heartwood, so a post with everything on it is three saplings. None of these numbers have been played with.

On a server

A chest is looked after by one player's game at a time, and that is the only copy worth believing. So the jib does not reach into a chest somebody else is holding. It asks, and the craft spends what comes back. Two people crafting out of one chest in the same second both see twenty iron, and if both games simply took it, both crafts would go through on one chest's worth. That is what the code does. I have not tested it with two real clients.

Where it is

All three are implemented and the branch compiles. I have not played any of it. The Deep North has no row in the boss table yet, so right now it falls through as open, and that gets fixed before this ships. Nothing on the server has changed.

Two things I would like opinions on. Should the jib cost bronze nails instead of iron, so you can build it while the Elder is still alive and it actually refuses you copper? And is three heartwoods too much for a post with everything on it?

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